Messages - parlezvous

Because we no longer understand war, we no longer understand that it can all go horribly wrong. We no longer understand that war begins by calling for the annihiliation of others but ends, if we do know when to make or maintain peace, with self-annihilation. We flirt, given the potency of modern industrial weapons, with our own destruction.

War allows us to rise above our station in life. We find nobility in a cause and feelings of selflessness and even bliss. And at a time of soaring and the very deterioration of our domestic fabric, war is a fine diversion. War, for those who enter into combat, has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it the lust of the eye and warns believers against it. War gives us a distorted sense of self; it gives us meaning.

The model that seems best able to describe a horizontally-networked society is found in the technology of holography. Without getting too enmeshed in the mechanics of the process, holography is a system that permits the creation of three-dimensional images in which a laser beam is split into "reference" and "object" beams. In the interplay between the "object" and "reference" beams, a photographic negative is produced. Unlike the negative of a standard camera, however -- in which the photographed object is clearly presented in negative form -- the holographic negative consists of an amorphous distribution of particles. What is most interesting is this: if you were to reproduce only a small portion of the negative taken from a standard camera, you would only get the image in that section of the negative. But if you were to run a laser through any portion of the holographic negative, the entire content of the negative is reproduced! The entire message, in other words, is distributed throughout the negative. Thus the word "hologram," which, in Greek, means "whole message."